MODERN TIMES : What’s wrong with America?
Art Hobson ahobson@uark.edu
Posted on Saturday, April 28, 2007
LINK
Two weeks ago, I was honored to be asked by one of my favorite organizations, the League of Women Voters, to speak about global warming. I hadn’t given a broad presentation on this topic for several years, so I rummaged up some PowerPoint slides and put a talk together. By the way, now that I’ve organized this presentation, I’d be delighted to give it to any other groups willing to listen (yes, this is the advertisement).
It’s fun to talk to the League because their intense interest in public affairs brings good questions and discussion. One slide showed America’s enormous amount of global warming pollution, 25 percent of the world’s total and (on a per capita basis ) more than twice that of the average European or Japanese, nations whose per capita gross national products and qualities of life are at least as high as ours. This led one audience member to ask “ What’s wrong with America ?”
My response described, as examples where we fall short, Europe and Japan’s high speed passenger trains (six times as energy efficient as cars ) and other mass transit, Europe’s stiff gasoline taxes, and Germany and Spain’s heavy use of wind for electricity. But these energy issues are mere symptoms. What’s really wrong with America lies deeper, in our culture.
In his masterful book “ Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, ” Jared Diamond studies a score of ancient and modern societies. The lesson of failed cultures such as the Polynesians of Easter Island, the native American Anasazi, and contemporary Rwanda, is that they chose to fail. It was obvious that the Easter Islanders were destroying their future by cutting down their forests in order to build towering religious sculptures, that Anasazi population growth was too rapid to be sustained within the canyon they had chosen for their home, and that Rwandan population pressures plus long-standing Tutsi repression of the Hutu would lead to tragedy. But these cultures were not self-critical, choosing instead to ignore the indicators and maintain “ business as usual. ”
So it is in America. A few thinkers, such as Morris Berman, author of “ Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire, ” are taking the needed look at ourselves, but few are listening.
Careening recklessly from disaster in Iraq to our deeply immoral global warming policy to our “ show me the money” political style, we not only approach collapse but, like the proverbial bull in the china shop, we tend to take the rest of the planet along with us.
What’s wrong with America ? Consider our response to the Virginia Tech murder rampage. These incidents are more prevalent in America than elsewhere (there have been seven such campus mass shooting incidents since 1997 ), our per capita murder rate is many times higher than in other industrialized nations, our per capita gun murder rate is 35 times higher than Britain’s, eight times higher than Australia’s, and 170 times higher than Japan’s. Something’s wrong here. We surely need serious evidence-based discussions of American violence, gun control, TV and video game violence, and mental health care to help us figure this out. But media coverage, especially television news, has instead featured personal stories and lurid violence.
This preference for anecdotes over learned discussion is an example of a broader American ailment: anti-intellectualism. Richard Hoffstadter, author of the 1962 classic “ Anti-intellectualism in America, ” traces this cultural trait to American religious fundamentalism, disdain of European values, and American business. As evidence of the destructive effects of fundamentalism, consider that roughly half of our people believe that humans were specially and separately created, and 59 percent believe “ endtimes” nonsense such as the “ rapture ” that will lift all true Christian believers bodily into heaven, leaving non-Christians to a deserved final destruction. This stuff rots our most human and most vital faculty, our ability to reason. Our disdain of foreign values is obvious in our ignorance of global affairs and our refusal to learn from other cultures. And the all-dominating American business culture is obvious in our money-soaked national elections and such materialistic and dysfunctional developments as the Pinnacle Hills Promenade in Rogers and other cathedrals to the almighty dollar.
Self-absorbed individualism is another American theme. The damage this does to our social system was obvious to me during a six month sabbatical in Stockholm in 1985. I looked all around that city of over a million and could find essentially no poor people. I saw single women on city streets at all hours with no real concerns about their safety. I saw an inexpensive, clean, reliable, and extensive public transportation system that served rich and poor with far greater comfort and speed than is possible in America’s car-centered system. I saw housing in the central city made affordable by public subsidies for low-income residents. These and much more are possible through the willingness of Swedes to tax themselves for the public good. We might regard their heavy taxation as a loss of freedom, but it seems to me that freedom from the constraints of poverty, the freedom to feel safe in one’s own city, freedom to travel where and when one wants, and freedom from the crushing ugliness of America’s decayed central cities are far more precious than extra cash for more TV sets, SUVs, and McMansions.
It’s obvious that America is not doing well. We were once a great nation and can become so again. But to get there we must have the courage to honestly assess where we are now, and to change what needs changing.
***
Art Hobson is a local resident and retired physics professor and is the author of “ Physics: Concepts and Connections, ” a college-level textbook for non-scientists. His column appears every other Saturday.